


Make That Angel Cry

by Icosagens



Series: Voyager 1 [2]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman and Robin (Comics)
Genre: Action & Romance, Bad Humor, Banter, Blackmail, Canon-Typical Violence, Dick Grayson is Batman, Dysfunctional Relationships, Follow the Yellow Brick Road, Harm to Children, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Mutual Pining, Past Character Death, Quests, Squabbling, Stephanie Brown is Batgirl, Their Love Is So, What else is new, except the destination is kind of important in this one, it's about the journey not the destination, ra's is awful
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:35:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26782258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Icosagens/pseuds/Icosagens
Summary: Ra's really believed they would think Damian had left of his own free will, which really, in the end, worked to their advantage. Strong-armed into an intrepid, Odysseus-level hero's journey to retrieve him from the League, Jason and Dick face an even greater enemy: unresolved sexual tension.
Relationships: Dick Grayson & Damian Wayne, Dick Grayson/Jason Todd
Series: Voyager 1 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1889794
Comments: 22
Kudos: 42





	Make That Angel Cry

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Harishe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Harishe/gifts).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Why are you telling me this,” Jason repeats.
> 
> “Because it’s nice to think that we live in a world where people can create their own truths, and believe them wholeheartedly on the sole basis that it’s presumed true.”
> 
> Jason wonders if he’s reading between lines that aren’t there, when instead of _people,_ he hears _we._ With his other hand, he digs his fingernails into his thigh, until he feels them begin to wear into his jeans.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for hari, my favorite drunk uncle, as promised, if several weeks late, and much longer than anticipated. 💕 i swear you'll get a finished piece, eventually.
> 
> thank you to everyone who listened to me + cheered me on + tolerated my whining while i was writing this. i thought i would never get it out. but, whee, jaydick! i'm officially a jaydick writer now!
> 
> prompt: "listen here, pretty boy," and/or, "you are such a showoff!"
> 
> \+ extra appreciation goes to the fabulous and fantastic win, niul, and jen, who beta-ed this for me!

Scrutinized through a kaleidoscope of years, the effect of refraction softening and prettying up every time they come to blows, there are times their—thing, not “thing” in the relationship sense—gleams under scrutiny. Vomit-worthy material, really. It starts three days in, during this moment, maybe.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been this bored in my life,” Jason declares. “Why did I agree to come with you, again?”

He can’t see Dick, but he can imagine just the way the hill of his left eyebrow raises, and the skin across his cheekbone scrunches. It’s always the left.

“Do you even _remember_ stakeouts with B? Because if you did, you wouldn’t be saying that.”

Throwing his eyes up toward the sky, and blowing his bangs out of his face, Jason starfishes outward and leans farther back into the grass.

“Why did I agree to come with you again?” he repeats, because if he lets himself say anything else, it might come out as, _“In case you forgot, I had to be tossed into a pit of green doom water to fix my brain after it was scrambled into gray matter smoothie,”_ and then his ribs would chew into each other and his heart would leaden and—

Not that Dick doesn’t deserve it, but the thickness caulking under Jason’s eyelids and the heaviness of his tongue kick his trigger finger far off the gun.

“Emotional blackmail, don’t you remember?”

“Have I ever mentioned that I despise you?”

“Say that with any less spite in your voice and people might start to wonder if you’re lying.”

“Just for that," Jason retorts, "you’re the entertainment for tonight.”

Dick hums at this, and Jason pauses in the tall task of searching out shapes in the stars to slip his head toward the side to glance at him. One of his hands rests in the dip between his final rib and his hip bone, and the other lays over his heart, like he is pledging his allegiance to a cause no one but him will ever know.

“When I was in high school,” Dick says, and Jason goes still, but does not look back toward the sky, “they made us analyze this study in AP Psych. It was about hindsight bias.”

“Dickie, do I look like somebody who gives a damn about that kind of thing?” Jason asks, fingering something puffy and crunchy he’s found in the grass. The way the moonlight spills is not illuminating enough to see what it actually is, but he assumes it’s a dandelion.

With a smile that waxes like this moon’s death to entropy, Dick tilts his head; his eyes run up the length of Jason’s jacket and land just below his cheekbones.

He doesn’t answer the question. Jason doesn’t know why he expected more from him.

“They isolated two groups of people,” Dick tells him. “The first one was told that science had proved that separation weakens romantic attraction. You know, ‘out of sight, out of mind?’”

He pauses. He chooses this moment, of all moments, to meet Jason’s eyes. Somehow, some way, he feels like he’s torn them down a midsaggittal split of the cornea, only to stitch them back together. It hurts.

How he should feel about this? Jason doesn’t know.

“They told the other group the opposite. That there was evidence that ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder.’”

Despite himself, Jason finds himself asking, “What’s the point of this? Is it for relatability points? You do know that being dead makes it hard to hitch a ride to high school, don’t you?”

Dick doesn’t even have to roll his eyes. “Right. Because Talia let you walk around in the League’s name without knowing at least five languages and being able to place all one hundred ninety-five countries on a map.”

Snorting, and moving to rest his stray hand on his knee, Jason doesn’t do Dick the same courtesy of muting the urge to scrunch up his face.

“I hate you.”

“Because I ruined your joke?” asks Dick, sounding genuinely inquisitive. The side of Jason’s lip sidles upward.

“So Mr. Emotional Literacy gets it wrong, for once in his life. Guess you can't always read me like a book, after all.”

Dick looks at him, for a little longer than a socially acceptable moment. Thus far during their conversation, his eyes have been drifting back toward the sky, on frequent enough occasions for their eye contact to be natural. Now, he forgoes that entirely.

“That’s what makes you interesting, Jason.” 

His face is entirely clean of expressions, when he meets Jason’s eyes. For the life of him Jason can’t tell whether he is messing with him or not.

“Tell me about the rest of the experiment,” says Jason, instead of letting that one sink in. In one ear, and out the other. It’s a talent he’s picked up over the years. A survival skill, with mentors like Bruce and Talia, who spun vitriol as often as they did genuine feedback and praise.

It took Jason far too long to figure that out. But Dick? It’s hard to tell if Dick is like either one of them. He didn’t know him any better now than the day he had molded a new posterity for the name of Robin with a box and a slip of paper.

There’s this part of him, that knows which one is the right answer. He’s spent most of these days with Dick shoving that part down.

Smiling, not as largely but no less genuine for it, Dick reaches out, and lets his hand hover over Jason’s shoulder. Jason does not shove away the hand, but he does not make any gesture of assent that the hand can make its landing, either. And Dick, rather than draw it away, like any other person, or move forward anyway, like any other person, he lets it hover there, lets the wind whistle between it and Jason’s clavicle.

“OK,” says Dick. “OK, so the first group, the ‘out of sight, out of mind one,’ unanimously accepted what they had been told was a fact. The farther they got into the experiment, the surer they were it was true all along, and that either they had known this before or that they should have seen it earlier.”

Jason narrows his eyes. “It’s pretty clear where this is going.”

Holding up a finger, Dick’s face doesn’t give an inch.

“You going to let me finish?” he asks.

“You going to make me stay up for no reason when we have to get up at three AM?”

“There’s nothing stopping you from leaving,” points out Dick, in a manner that could almost be serene, if it wasn’t _Dick._

Jason tilts up his head; opens his mouth toward the sky and sucks a breath in between his teeth. “You bore a guy to death,” he says. “But keep going, because if I’m going to have to face Talia and Ra’s tomorrow, I don’t want to be in full possession of my faculties.”

“As you've so clearly guessed, the ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ group was just as confident that what they had been told was right.”

Rather than reply, Jason moves his hand so that it hovers over Dick’s, and grasps between the webs of his fingers. With deliberate intent he fastidiously kept clinical, Jason shifts it so it rests on his knee.

“As I’m sure you’ve figured out, there’s no actual scientific evidence to prove either.”

“Why are you telling me this,” Jason repeats.

“Because it’s nice to think that we live in a world where people can create their own truths, and believe them wholeheartedly on the sole basis that it’s presumed true.”

Jason wonders if he’s reading between lines that aren’t there, when instead of _people_ , he hears _we_. With his other hand, he digs his fingernails into his thigh, until he feels them begin to wear into his jeans.

There is a thing about pseudoscience: the divine creator of psychological principles determined for the purpose of shutting down the viability of obsolete human brain functions. And that thing? It’s that nobody can escape it. It brings every single person down to the same godforsaken level of the primordial soup they swim around in on this mortal coil. No matter how intelligent, no matter how rational, no matter if they are as much a slave to the art of deduction as Sherlock Holmes, they can’t escape it.

_Yeah, Bruce, yeah, Luthor, yeah, Ra’s, that means you._

There’s always a bleakness to informative media, no matter how objective the conditions it’s ostensibly created under. The pursuit of knowledge, the unravelling of the universe, it is a burden that stoops a person as low to the ground as Atlas. 

Talia had told him, once, that while ignorance would be the downfall of man, it was also his greatest strength. A catch twenty-two for the ages. She’d never elaborated, beyond that; she’d stared at the sun as it dripped from the sky in colors that suns were never supposed to be, and these colors had shone in her eyes.

Jason had never asked.

Actually, it had started three days ago—this. Whatever this was, whatever split the tips of his nerve endings until they shrieked every time Dick opened his goddamn mouth. If he were to approach himself with complete candor, he would admit that this had started way before that. 

Maybe it started when Nightwing had burst through the window in a flurry of melodrama he wouldn’t find shameful to this day to save his ass from a drug bust gone wrong. Maybe it started when he handed him his costume and a phone number, one Robin to another. One equal to another.

As Jason, bracketed between two of the Batcave’s guardrails, had listened to the vitriol spewed and fists exchanged with Bruce that same day, it was set in stone that he would never forget Dick Grayson.

Albeit, this did leave room for an entire round robin of other emotions.

No, it started three days ago. It started like this:

Despite popular belief, Jason is not petty enough to obstinately ignore every piece of advice he's ever received from Bruce; the key word here is every, which is why he picks up the phone for an unidentified number.

"Who's this?" Jason asks, keeping his voice level with the stiff lines that coalesce to form the apartment he had currently commandeered for his purposes.

"Oh, thank God," says Stephanie Brown's voice. "This is probably the seventeenth number I've called. Barbara refused to help me find you, which, _wow,_ because I know for a fact that she keeps tabs on whatever the hell it is you're doing these days. She may have a genius IQ and an eidetic memory, but she's not slick. Anyway—" She pauses; there is some shifting, and the rustling of what Jason assumes is her hair. "—a few things have gone down over the last few days, and unfortunately they call for your attention.”

There is way too much to parse through in that statement: Steph's dogged determination to find a man with whom she shared the most fond experience of watching the Boy Wonder heal from a slit throat inflicted by his truly, among other things. The fact that Barbara is apparently "keeping tabs on him." Whatever ilk of situation he was to be privy to an update on. Why in the nine circles of hell she had thought she would give him said update on whatever was going on in Bruce's mockery of a war, these days.

What he finds himself saying, however, is, "You're going to tell me how you knew where to look for me, because if I can't shake you all soon, you're going to find baby al Ghul's head mounted to your wall."

Steph lets out an aborted snort. The beat of her breaths: in, out, in, becomes audible through the speaker.

"That's pretty lackluster, after your whole 'eight heads in a duffel bag' stunt."

Pursing his lips, Jason swallows to repress a sound in a similar vein that is burgeoning to burst from his own throat.

"We aren't friends," he says. "Drop the jokes and either answer my question or tell me what the hell this call is about."

"You break a girl's heart," ripostes Steph, in the most awful shade of monotone that's ever graced Jason's ears. "B and his rogue gallery had a stunning history of mutual jest before he decided to commodify vigilante tutoring on a global scale. You'd think that Dick would get to have just as much fun, but with a villain like you, it's no wonder he's so quippy when our cases align."

Jason is about to hang up, because vitriol isn't a strong enough word for the sensation he experiences every time people like Steph try and play marionette with him, but she blusters on, and he finds himself just beguiled enough by her following change in tone to continue listening.

"In all seriousness, I don't like you either. Or respect you, for that matter,” says Steph. “But we need you, so I guess that's really too bad for the both of us."

Jason doesn’t even do her the courtesy of a “Fuck off,” before he hangs up. In hindsight, it wasn’t his best idea. Not because he regretted it, because he didn’t, but because there was an infectious disease that suppurated from the elliptic that revolved around Bruce: it was called, “I don’t know when to take a hint.”

Not even thirty minutes later, he swallows so hard he can feel his uvula smash against his tongue, because the camera he has installed places Dick outside his door.

Jason takes no courtesies; he takes the sort of low, heavy steps that would be audible not only to the floor below him, but to his latest visitor. Schismatically and deliberately, he tugs open the door.

He doesn’t even give Dick time to open his mouth, doesn’t even deign to look into his eyes or catch his expression before he presses his teeth together to grit out his piece. To look at Dick’s face before telling him to shove off is on the same line of stupidity as uncovering his ears during a siren's song. It makes Jason want to slice crescents into the cove in his neck, right beneath the angular underpinnings of his chin.

This man, this man who says he will never deign to play, in the Commissioner Gordon’s Hail Mary from a time Jason didn’t let himself think about much anymore, “judge, jury, and executioner,” this man lets them believe it. Jason finds it heinous.

“Boy MIA Wonder’ll have a split throat for the rest of his life because of me. I shot baby Talia. I played dress-up in your little costume and then _killed people in it._ I played with Gotham City like it was my goddamn sandbox. What do you _want?_ Because I don’t think I could make it clearer that what I want is for you to disappear. Permanently.”

“Well I can’t give you that,” Dick’s voice tells him, so quiet it resists echoing in the prime topography of the hallway. “Quiet,” might be misleading, actually.There is an undertone, whittled to a fine point. “But maybe now’s your time to pay your dues for some of what you've done.”

“Don’t make me slam the door in your face, Dickie,” Jason says. “Just because I’ve been on the down-low lately, doesn’t mean that I’m going to stand around chatting with you like we’re all buddy-buddy now. You think Batman and the Joker ever had a civil conversation?”

“Funny,” Dick ripostes, “I’ve always taken you for a Harvey Dent.”

If it wasn’t for some of the scars that still spiderwebbed upward along Dick’s forearms à la his own confrontation with Two Face, Jason thinks he would have decked him right then and there. _Do you know at all what that man did to my daddy, golden boy?_

“That’s just the goody two shoes part of you that thinks I can be redeemed and brought back into the ‘family’ fold.”

“We haven’t been family in a long time, Jason.”

It sets Jason off kilter, Dick’s response. The closest experience he can juxtapose it with is woozy, water-deprived head rushes.

“No, we haven’t,” he says. “Which means there’s absolutely no reason for you to be here, right now, talking to me. Apparently, B’s already done a stupendous job of making sure I'll never be that to you again; there’s no work for you left to do.”

Silence. One, two three; two, two, three; three, two, three; four, two three. Jason lifts his gaze to stare Dick in the eye. Incongruently, uncharacteristically, there is not even an attempt to pretty them up.

“Do you still remember,” Dick asks, “how to get to Nanda Parbat?”

From here, Jason is able to catch an inkling of what is going on. He makes no attempt to stymie the scowl his lips purse into.

“So the brat went crying for mommy. I’m gonna be honest: that sounds like a you problem.”

Dick snorts, sardonically. He’s messing with his hands, Jason notes; not even trying to conceal it by doing it in his pockets.

“More like mommy went crying for him,” he says.

That one has Jason cocking an eyebrow. There are only so many ways that statement can be interpreted, but—

mostly, he’s just tired of the tilt of Dick’s face; he’s tired of what happens when he speaks, and when he moves, and when he breathes. There is stubble plastered across his jaw, he notes, and dark bags crinkling beneath his eyelashes.

“I’m not B. You can quit it with the mind games; just tell it to me straight. Did the kid defect or not?”

Then, though, there is the curve of his lips, the shades of his cheekbones. Then, there are Dick’s eyes. It’s not the blue. Everyone thinks it’s the blue, that makes his eyes, but it isn’t.

There is an ordeal, to this knowledge. Jason decided a long time ago that he wasn’t going to bear it. That’s why he can glare at him, and why he does.

Dick, for his part, looks to be tasting words. Testing them out. And then, he tells it to him straight.

“Ra’s kidnapped him.”

Ah.

 _“No,”_ Jason says, and it’s level: not said in a snarl or a sneer or a bite. He likes to think that it makes that “no” a little more powerful. “Absolutely not. You can go and reel him back into the fold yourself.”

Dick cocks his head, but doesn’t speak. It’s his own way of ushering Jason forward, and though he knows he’s falling right into the trap when the lip of his throat begins to burn.

“The kid is your responsibility. _You_ decided to play ‘happy family’ with him after B went off and got himself killed. _You_ dressed him in the cape and the boots. _You_ decided to spend your time coaching him through processing ten years of trauma.”

There are about ten thousand routes Dick could take to palliate—whatever this parasitic intention that itches under Jason’s skin is. He could pounce on Jason’s invalidation of Bruce’s life. He could point out that had he not given Damian Robin, they would with great certitude be responsible for the ascension of the next Ra’s al Ghul. If he was feeling acerbic enough, he could throw conceptualized trauma right back in Jason’s face.

“I dressed you in the cape and boots, too," he says instead. "What does that make you?”

Maybe Dick expects this to stump him. Maybe Dick expects it to make him reconsider.

Dick is too sharp for that.

“You know what it makes me, golden boy?” Jason asks him, with more relish than strictly necessary. “It makes me the exact person to tell you that none of us, despite what Bruce would have you believe, have any obligation toward each other. We’re not the Brady Bunch, this isn’t some kind of _found family_ story to slap on a Hallmark special.”

With this, he pauses. Waits for Dick to say, “I dissent,” waits for him to say, “Jeopardy!” or, “This is a comprehensive pontification on why everything you have said, ever, in your life, is wrong.”

But he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t say anything at all.

“You just told me we weren’t family anymore. So follow your own advice, before I slam this door in your face and don’t wait until your fingers aren’t wrapped around the doorframe to do it.”

Jason can pinpoint the exact moment that Dick’s face shifts. A series of steps that barrel over each other, one, by one, by one, and synthesize into an unprecedented expression, for him. Thus, Frankenstein makes his monster.

“Dammit Jason, can you pull your head out of the sand for once in your life?” Dick demands. “This isn’t about you, or your feud with Bruce, or me, or Tim. Has it even occurred to you that maybe, just maybe, Talia’s brainwashed you as much as you claim Bruce has us? Because the Jason I knew would never leave a ten-year-old kid to the people who abused him for most of his life.”

In contrast, the moment Jason’s vision goes green is a nebulous, hazy experience, and as his touch on the world slackens, as the feeling in his fingers flows down in rivulets, he takes a step toward Dick. Then another. Then another.

“The Jason you knew died in a warehouse in Ethiopia, after an enemy that wasn’t even his beat him silly with a crowbar to spite the guy who was supposed to protect him. I watched my life tick down in seconds, Dick. You don’t come back from that.”

Dick’s hand clenches so tightly around the doorframe that Jason can begin to pick out some of the veins slipped beneath his knuckles.

“I didn’t take you for the kind of guy who played victim,” Dick says. It’s not quite as dangerous as it could be; his words have a more aggressive tilt that levels way under the nuclear power of a low, soft murmur. “That kind of stuff changes you, sure, but you’re still here. You’re not dead, Jason. If you were you wouldn’t have opened the door for me in the first place.”

“Well, let me fix that,” Jason snaps.

Then, he slams the door, and the light from the hallway that has been warming his face is snuffed out. Readjusting his jacket, he huffs, digging his socked feet into the carpet and listening doggedly to the hum of the fridge, rather than what must be Dick’s departing footsteps.

The rest of the night is discourteously uneventful. Jason eats dinner. He washes the dishes. He starts working at the coding for a new camera to remove the supplying company’s ability to tap into the footage.

Only once do Jason’s thoughts drift back to Dick. It’s when he’s in the shower; when he levels a line of shampoo onto his palm, it curves up in a way that has Dick’s smile and Dick’s face superimposing over the image. It is a mirage more adroit than most deserts can manage.

He curls his hands into a fist, and the image dissolves as fast as it was there.

Jason doesn’t spend much longer in the shower after that.

Socks off. Jacket off. That’s the culmination of his bedtime routine, besides slipping his belt from his jean loops and wrapping it around his forearm for the night. He learned the hard way in the League that leaving it astray left people with only another tool to—he’s feeling euphemistic; eliminate him.

Jason's never had trouble with falling asleep, so it’s nigh on two minutes before his tether on the waking world slips.

Staying asleep is another matter entirely.

The dark is black, but he can see every line and edge, and the cloying silk engulfing his back and hands shines whiter than the sun. Airtight. It’s airtight, so why are his lungs heaving through cloaks of dirt? His nose shouldn’t be smothered, flecks of fertilizer shouldn’t be sprinkled across his bottom lip.

He tries to scream. There is one certainty in this hell, and that is that no one is coming, this he knows in his bones. Still, he tries to scream.

The void shrieks back. Or—laughs. That’s what that sound is. The sound is laughing. He blinks, and blinks again, because he thought it was phosphorescence, but there is a crack of light streaming from one of the edges. His nails scrabble against the lip of this fault line in the dark.

There is give; he finds that he can pry open this encasement. When he lurches forward out into the light, hacking and coughing, the—box? chest? coffin—goes blurry in his peripheral vision, before vanishing entirely. He turns around, suddenly desperate for it to be there, if only for its familiarity, clutching at his neck in some attempt to claw open his trachea.

Where his prison stood there is a convoluted piece of machinery, wires poofing outward in ringlets and a motley of parts strewn around.

The centripetal force driving all of this is cocooned by a series of the more colorful wires, safely sulking in the resulting maw.

Six-colon-thirteen, says the bomb clock.

Jason can feel his heartbeat. You’re not supposed to be able to feel your heartbeat, right? Buh- _boom,_ buh- _boom,_ buh- _boom._

Somewhere in the distance, Bruce’s voice says, “I taught you better than that. You can never let your breaths take control of you. Take control of _them,_ Robin.”

Peering up to the side of the bomb, toward the sound of the noise, Jason catches a glimpse of his Batboots.

“The mind controls the body. I can’t have a partner who doesn’t know that.”

Jason squeezes his eyes shut; he can’t look at the boots for another second. Closing them doesn’t help, however. The boots are still there, but they are morphing in color and size. First, their upper halves melt, and get absorbed into the floor like they were never there at all. Material from the lip of the shoe slips up from between Bruce’s—no, too small, too brown—toe and wraps around the foot as something else entirely. Steel-toes, Jason realizes.

As red laces erupt from the unidentified subject’s leg, he watches with a feeling he doesn’t know how to begin to place as the fronts of their shoes grow eyes and a gaping maw. 

All of this happens in a second. All of this happens in a year.

“You must be _Jason Todd,”_ they say, in tandem. “It’s nice to meet my father’s greatest failure.”

Snarling, Jason attempts to crawl forward. Attempts. His hands—aren’t working. _His hands aren’t working._ Heart thumping quicker still, he tears his gaze away from the shoes and looks up.

The Joker stands before him, wearing a yellow zoot suit, his face casted in shadow by an oversized, purple cloak.

“You break a girl’s heart,” he says. “You losing control like that just colors me so _nervous._ Is that what happened when you killed Felipe? Did your breaths go absolutely _batty_ like that? _Hah!_ Get it, batty?”

“Shut up.”

“I bet it started just like this. I bet you felt _powerless._ I bet you wanted to do _anything_ to change that.”

_“Shut up.”_

“Was it really ever about Gloria?” the Joker asks, but Jason can swear he hears “B” where that “G” is supposed to be, and “R” where there should be an “L.”

Was it really ever about Bruce?

_“Shut the fuck up.”_

“It must be hard to admit that it wasn’t. Don’t worry about it too much, Boy Blunder. Humans are selfish creatures, really! Being the exception to the rule is extraordinary. We can’t all be like the blue bird. Although I hear these days he’s taken up Batsy’s doom and gloom shtick for himself.”

“You wanna talk about me killing Felipe? I’ll kill _you,”_ Jason snarls.

“Tut, tut, replacement. Quiet, or I’ll have half a mind to throw _you_ off a balcony. Won’t that be _fun?_ I bet you’ll see the little demon boy on the way down.”

“The hell are you talking about?”

“Well,” says the Joker, “isn’t it obvious? You killed him, too.”

The last thing Jason hears is a low, long beep, before the warehouse explodes. Then he shoots up in bed, panting.

It takes him five minutes to calm down. Another five to make a decision.

Feeling around for his phone in the mess that’s left of his bedspread, he snatches it between his fingers, letting them do the work in punching in the numbers in the dark.

_“Hello?”_

“Listen here, pretty boy,” Jason says. “I’ll be at the Cave in twenty. Be there, or be square.”

_“Wh—”_

Jason hangs up.


End file.
